Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, and Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, spoke by phone on Monday. According to reports, the call did not go well.
Lavrov is believed to have told Rubio that Russia would not accept freezing the current front line in Ukraine.
However, on Tuesday, the White House described the call as “productive”, adding: “Therefore, an additional in-person meeting between the secretary and foreign minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future”.
Lavrov refused to compromise on Moscow’s maximalist position in discussions with Rubio.
“I want to officially confirm: Russia has not changed its position compared to the understandings that were reached during the Alaska summit,” he told reporters in Moscow after reports of his call with his American counterpart.
Ukrainian and European sources were buoyed by the Russian refusal to negotiate amid fears Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be pressured to cede territory to Moscow as the price for peace.
The Coalition of the Willing, a group of allied European nations, accused Putin of “stalling tactics” in his talks with Trump.
“We can all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction,” the statement added.
Since meeting the US President in Alaska, Putin has demanded that Ukraine withdraws from its eastern Donbas regions, Donetsk and Luhansk, as a precondition for peace.
Trump reportedly pressured Zelenskyy to accept this proposal in a bruising encounter in the White House on Friday.
However, the surrender of Donetsk, which Moscow has failed to fully occupy since 2014, remains a red line for the Ukrainian President, who has said he would only negotiate on the basis of the current front lines.
Speaking to reporters, Trump appeared to row behind the Ukrainian position, insisting he wanted to see the fighting “stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines”.
On Tuesday, the Kremlin pointed out that no clear date had been set for the meeting.
“Listen, we have an understanding of the presidents, but we cannot postpone what has not been finalised,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said.
“Neither President Trump nor President Putin gave exact dates.”
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